Use food to adjust hormones and avoid gaining weight again! If you do intermittent fasting wisely, you can still lose weight at the age of 40

If you fast properly, it will not affect your hormones, but will help them! Cynthia. Thoreau is a nurse and an internationally renowned women's health expert. Although she looks good now, she actually experienced a period of inexplicable weight gain and inability to lose weight after giving birth and when she was sick. At that time, she worked out and ate less, but did not lose 1 kilogram. Later, after research and a large amount of literature research, she found that the reason why she could not lose weight was "hormones." She found that as long as they understood the hormonal mechanism and combined it with 168-hour fasting, anyone could lose weight effectively.

Why is it 168 fasting? How to eat it effectively?

Cynthia. Thoreau believes that, unlike men, women experience many different physiological cycles in their lives, which affect hormone fluctuations and cause progesterone, estrogen, etc. to fluctuate. At this time, you will constantly want to eat, and it will be out of control. But as long as you master some eating principles, you can maintain your body shape, including:

(1) Eat in 16:8 mode

That means fasting for 16 hours a day and eating within 8 hours.

(2) Follow the 532 principle when eating

Each meal should be in the ratio of 50 protein, 30 fat and 20 carbohydrate (unit: %).

(3) Master the order of eating

Eat protein first, then fat, and finally carbohydrates and vegetables.

What is intermittent fasting?

Simply put, intermittent fasting means "reducing the frequency of eating." You'll have periods of time when you don't eat anything (called fasting periods) and only eat during certain "eating periods." During your mealtimes, you can enjoy protein, healthy fats, and non-starchy carbohydrates without having to count the calories. You will carefully set eating and fasting times and deliberately reduce the frequency of eating, which may be to skip one meal or several meals.

There are three types of intermittent fasting methods that are most widely used by the public: alternate-day fasting, eating today and fasting the next day; 5:2 intermittent fasting, fasting two days a week and eating the other five days; and daily time-restricted feeding, not eating for more than 12 to 16 hours a day (including sleeping time at night) and only eating at specific times.

My 6-week intermittent fasting plan is centered around time-restricted eating and is based on the 16:8 model (16 hours fasting, 8 hours eating). This is the easiest, most flexible and most suitable plan for women of all ages. You can arrange your eating and fasting periods according to your physiological stage (childbearing age, perimenopause, menopause or postmenopause) so that it can suit your condition and help maintain the balance of hormones in your body. In addition, this fasting time is actually not very long. After the body gradually adapts to fasting, the fasting time can be slowly extended little by little.

Unlike many other types of diet plans, many studies have shown that time-restricted eating has a higher adherence rate, which means it is easy to implement and can be continued for as long as you want! My plan also helps you eat a variety of nutrient-rich foods during your mealtimes. Best of all, the 16:8 plan offers many proven health benefits, especially when it comes to women’s health.

Intermittent fasting is a new concept to the general public and is a novel way of eating that has only recently become popular. Having said that, people often forget that intermittent fasting has been around for a long time. In fact, it coincides with the eating patterns of our ancestors. In prehistoric times or when materials were not so abundant, our ancestors did not eat three fixed meals a day and often had snacks. They did not have easy access to endless amounts of food like we do today. They may have gone for long periods without eating, as food was not easy to find at the time. Depending on the season and climate, some days they may eat several meals a day, but other days they may only eat one meal or even nothing at all. This is why I believe that humans are well suited to an intermittent fasting diet because that is how we evolved and how we are wired to eat.

Ten benefits of intermittent fasting

For your health, for your hormones, and for your well-being as a woman, intermittent fasting is the most powerful choice you can make. In fact, it’s also more powerful than any medication I could prescribe. Shortening your eating window and lengthening your fasting window can bring you some amazing benefits. Here are the top 10 benefits of intermittent fasting:

** Burn fat

Many women in their 30s, 40s, or 50s have dieted for years to lose weight, but their weight keeps going up and down. Not only that, this fluctuation has a tendency to increase year by year, from the original 4.5 kg a year to 9 kg, 14 kg or even larger fluctuations, so many women's wardrobes are filled with clothes of various large and small sizes. This type of dieting that causes your weight to fluctuate is called yo-yo dieting and is very bad for your health. Women who yo-yo their diet have a higher risk of heart disease than women whose weight remains stable over the years, according to a study by the American Heart Association. Repeated dieting is definitely not a good eating habit, but now you have the ability to break this habit because intermittent fasting can help you.

One of the reasons why intermittent fasting can help you is that it can balance the hormones in your body. Many important hormones in the human body can be activated by intermittent fasting, and most of these hormones can have many positive effects on weight control and health, such as: enhancing "lipolysis" (i.e. burning fat), increasing metabolic flexibility (the ability to use fuel appropriately, see below for details), and preventing the body from storing fat. In the following chapters, I will introduce these hormones in detail.

In addition to balancing your hormones, fasting can also speed up your metabolism, which can also help you maintain a healthy weight. One review study found that fasting can reduce abdominal fat by 4% to 7%. This proves that intermittent fasting is a powerful tool for us when losing weight. Another reason why intermittent fasting can help us has to do with the type of fat we have in our bodies. There are two types of fat tissue in the human body: brown fat and white fat. Brown fat can burn energy because it contains large numbers of mitochondria, the power plants of cells.

If you could choose, which type of fat would you prefer to have more of? Brown fat, right? But things are not that simple. Adults don't have much brown fat. Generally speaking, brown fat is only found in large quantities in infants, and their cute "baby fat" is usually made up of brown fat. But the good news is that scientists recently discovered that we can turn white fat into brown! Intermittent fasting is the driving force behind this transformation.

This wonderful discovery was observed in experiments on mice. At that time, the researchers allowed one group of mice to eat on an alternate-day fasting schedule; the other group of mice was allowed to eat whenever they wanted, as much as they liked. Later, they found in the fasting group of mice that intermittent fasting changed their intestinal flora, which also prompted the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) in the intestine. This reaction can convert white fat, which stores fat, into brown fat, which burns fat. It can not only effectively reduce obesity, but also improve insulin resistance (a major problem that leads to diabetes).

Of course, the experimental subjects of this study were mice, not humans, and I took this into consideration when citing the research. However, mice metabolize in a similar way to humans, so these findings are still worth noting. The important message conveyed by this study is that intermittent fasting is very helpful for burning fat.

This article is from Linking Publishing's "The Complete Book of 6-Week 168 Intermittent Fasting for Women: Professional Nutritionists Teach You How to Make Good Use of the 532 Principle and Use Food to Adjust Hormones. It is Applicable to Postpartum, Menopause, and Amenorrhea. You Can Lose Weight Even After 40! 》